While consumers may access media items, such as movies and television shows, by receiving over the air signals or by subscribing to a cable or satellite television provider, increasingly consumers are accessing content over Internet-based systems. Some Internet-based systems allow users to download or stream content over the Internet to a variety of client devices. For example, an Internet-based media system may provide content to users via a personal computer, a set-top box, or a personal mobile device, such as a smart phone or tablet computer. In particular, streaming media systems enable users to access media content in a stream, such that the users may begin consuming (e.g., watching and/or listening to) content before the entirety of the content is delivered to a given user's client device. Such a system allows users to access content while avoiding a potentially lengthy download process before beginning to consume their selected content.
Media content providers, as well as media content producers, often work with a large amount of content. For example, a media content provider may provide hundreds of thousands of movies, television episodes, or other types of video content to consumers. With such a vast library of content, media consumers may wish to efficiently represent such content to consumers who are browsing the library of content. For example, as consumers look at various titles, they may be provided with a brief movie trailer or a slideshow of cut-scenes from the movie. Creating such trailers or slideshows for hundreds of thousands of titles can require a large amount of resources. Even on a smaller scale, a content producer may record a large amount of footage, only a fraction of which will be used in the final piece. It would be desirable to have methods and systems that can efficiently analyze, detect, and characterize scenes within media items to help media providers create representational content such as trailers and slideshows, or to help media producers find ideal footage for a final product.
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